Pill-packing robot frees up staff
Pharmacists are paying more attention to their customers thanks to a robot hiding behind the counter.
Douglas Pharmaceuticals and Japan manufacturer Yuyama’s Alpaca Robot dispenses and packs common drugs into labelled blister packets in 100 pharmacies across New Zealand.
The 100th robot was installed in Christchurch’s Hornby Life Pharmacy on Wednesday.
Fiona Grove’s West Auckland Unichem pharmacy was one of the first to install the robot three years ago. It cost more than $65,000 but she said the robot paid for itself within two years.
‘‘It is like having another person in the pharmacy but not having to pay them a wage for the next 10 years.’’
The robot stores 60 drugs and dispenses them into sealed blister packs labelled with dosage instructions.
Grove’s robot packs pills for hospitalised and elderly customers. The robot cut her staff by about 30 per cent, she said, and she managed this reduction through natural attrition.
One of her technicians left when she bought the robot, but she has since rehired staff to do immunisations, blood pressure checks and emergency contraceptive consultations.
Grove said her pharmacy had only been able to offer those extra services since using the robot.
‘‘We have been able to free up staff to provide those in-house services and not be really pressed for time. We were so busy before just doing manual things.’’
For that reason, she said her robot debunked the common assumption that robots would steal jobs from humans.
‘‘It is not necessarily going to replace the human touch.’’
Pharmacy accountancy firm Moore Stephens Markhams surveyed 141 pharmacy owners, 22 of whom had robots like the Alpaca. The survey found that the wage costs of most of the pharmacies with robots were 1 per cent lower than pharmacies without a robot.